Free A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley

again.

    "Don't you realize they've destroyed us at every turn? You bet she was sad, of course she was sad! But why didn't she give me a fucking chance?" He put his face in his hands.

    After a minute, I mustered the gumption to say, "I don't know, Jess," but I was shaken and afraid. When I went to take the next tomato plant out of the flat, my hands were trembling so much that I broke the stem in two. Jess, meanwhile, got up and walked around, heaving. Finally he took off his T-shirt, which read, "CASCADES I0K RUN JUNE 4, I978," and wiped his face and neck with it. He said, "I'd better go home."

    "You haven't offended me. Anyway, I'm not sure you should see Harold in that mood."

    "I mean back to Seattle. Ah shit." He sat down again, took some deep breaths, and managed a smile. "Ginny, none of this is new. It's very old, I'm used to it, and most of the time, I'm better at cultivating inner peace. I stopped being mad all the time when I stopped drinking.

    I mean, that was when I realized that maybe Alison and I wouldn't have lasted together. I loved her, I really did, but what I loved most was being mad at her parents for her. Being on her side, when nobody else had been that I could see. I can't believe I'm getting upset like this now."

    After a minute, I said, "Don't you think it had to be, whenever you learned about your mother? Now it's been. How am I going to believe that life is good and change is good if you don't?"

    "I do think that."

    We smiled at each other. I couldn't believe that I had ever found his smile merely charming. Another lesson in that lifelong course of study about the tricks of appearance.

    IT HAD BEEN more THAN three months since Rose's operation, and she was making a good recovery. The chemotherapy was over and she had that large-eyed, astonished-but-not-surprised look about her that I've since seen on other cancer patients. They had taken her right breast, the muscles on the right side of her chest, and the lymph glands under her right arm, a traditional radical mastectomy. I was still cooking for her fairly often, and, of course, seeing her every day, but she would pass into a state of irritability if I mentioned her health, so I didn't; but I did watch her closely, looking for signs of fatigue or weakness or pain. The day after my talk with Jess Clark, I drove her to Mason City for her three-month checkup. We hardly spoke on the way there. She was annoyed at little things-the belt of her jacket getting closed in the car door, having to stop for gas, running into a little traffic about ten blocks from the hospital, and then being live or six minutes late for her appointment. Our plan was to shop a little after the hospital, then go to the Brown Bottle for dinner, but our unspoken agreement was that it all depended on the doctor's appointment. If the news was bad, there would be no telling what we would do-the future would lie before us as a blank, and, somehow, we would honor that.

    In fact, the appointment went beautifully. The moment we walked in the door, the nurses greeted her with happy warmth, and it was hard not to be comforted by just that, as if they already knew good news, and all they had to do was tell it to us. The doctor found nothing at all suspicious, and congratulated Rose on how much movement and strength she had gotten back in her arm, "in so short a time." Rose smiled at his wording, and I did, too, but just hearing him say it lightened those long, heavy months, somehow, the worst months of the year in our part of the country, when the sky is like iron day after day, and the wind is endless, chill, and hostile, even on those days when a little weak sunlight blossoms through the clouds. It was easy, while he was giving us the good news, to marvel at how depressed we'd been, almost without knowing it, easy to regard his round pink face with affection, easy to feel transformed as we came out of the hospital into the pleasant May air, which was sweetened and colored by the